To justify the £145 (about $220) annual fee, the BBC takes the line that many of the programs available through its iPlayer service are only available to UK viewers. Of course, that's easy to circumvent using a VPN that allows those outside the UK to access content as if they were in the country. The BBC has finally woken up to this fact, and drawn exactly the wrong conclusion about what it should do, as TorrentFreak (TF) reports:

Over the past several days TF has received several reports from VPN users who can no longer access iPlayer from UK-based VPN servers.

"BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only," is the notice they receive instead.

Instead of gracefully accepting the reality that geoblocking makes no sense in a world where VPNs allow users to appear to be more or less wherever they wish, the BBC has decided to try to block such access, including VPNs used by UK license-payers:

The BBC informs TF that the VPN ban was implemented to keep iPlayer 'pirates' at bay. The company is doing its best to keep company and school VPNs [in the UK] open but advises regular users to disconnect their VPN service in advance if they want to access iPlayer.

In our post-Snowden world, where the use of a VPN is becoming ever-more prudent, the BBC has just provided a strong disincentive for doing so in the UK. That's really shabby treatment for BBC license-payers, who ought to be allowed to access content in a secure manner. It's also bad news for everyone online, since the more widely VPNs are deployed, the less using one marks you out for special attention by government intelligence agencies. What the BBC should have done here is see the desire of people outside the UK to view its programs as a great opportunity to meet an evident need -- and to generate extra income.

from the name-and-shame dept

While there have been some complaints from ISPs about how much bandwidth the BBC's iPlayer offering takes up, the BBC is being rather aggressive in responding. mike allen writes in to let us know that the BBC has announced that it will publicly "name and shame" any ISP that tries to traffic shape in a way that harms its iPlayer offering. As the BBC's Ashley Highfield says: "Unlimited broadband should mean unlimited." He then goes on to suggest that other websites also agree to name and shame traffic shaping ISPs: "Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content worked best on (and which to avoid)." Sounds reasonable enough. Of course, you might say that if all ISPs agree to traffic shape, then naming and shaming them won't do much good. But, if there's a truly competitive market, that would simply open up the opportunity for one ISP to publicly claim that it wasn't traffic shaping, and then happily watch customers come running.